Donald Trump recently called for a Fake News Trophy on Twitter. While I can understand that Donald Trump might be upset with CNN (the Clinton News Network), his attempt to exclude Fox from the award backfired. After all, Fox probably does remain the largest major source of false information after Donald Trump himself. Earlier this month the Washington Post Fact Checker found that Trump has made 1,628 false or misleading claims over 298 days since becoming president.

Rasmussen, the Republican-leaning polling outfit, conducted a poll to award the Fake News Trophy. Despite the biases of Rasmussen, the First Annual Fake News Trophy went to Fox. While there was the expected partisan bias in the results, overall Fox did win at 40 percent, with CNN well behind at 25 percent. From Rasmussen:

Trump suggested earlier this week that the media should award an annual Fake News Award for the worst coverage of his presidency but left Fox News out of the running since it is the only network the president and his supporters believe gives him fair coverage. But 40% of all voters think Fox News should be the winner of the first annual Fake News Trophy.

CNN is in second place with 25% support, followed by MSNBC (9%), ABC (4%), CBS (3%) and NBC (2%). Six percent (6%) say the award should go to someone else, and 11% are undecided.

A closer look finds that while 53% of Democrats and a plurality (42%) of voters not affiliated with either major party declare Fox News the winner, just 24% of Republicans agree. Forty percent (40%) of GOP voters opt instead for CNN, a view shared by just 13% of Democrats and 24% of unaffiliateds.

Republicans and unaffiliated voters are more critical of MSNBC than Democrats are, too. Views of the other networks are more comparable among the three groups.

The fundamental principles of democracy have been under attack for several months, unfortunately by both major political parties. The lack of respect for democratic norms by Donald Trump and his Republican supporters has been well documented. Rather than presenting a clear alternative, the last nominee for the Democratic nomination has also been attacking Democratic norms, including acceptance of election results and freedom of speech. Hillary Clinton repeated her attacks on the legitimacy of the 2016 election in an interview with Ari Berman of Mother Jones.

During the election, when there was a question of Donald Trump not accepting the results of the election, Hillary Clinton said that Donald Trump “threatens democracy” by not accepting the election results. She also said, “We know, in our country, the difference between leadership and dictatorship. And the peaceful transition of power is something that sets us apart.”

Since then, Hillary Clinton lost the election after running a terrible campaign. It was a huge mistake for the Democrats to essentially rig the nomination for a weak candidate as opposed to allowing a stronger candidate capable of winning a national campaign to be its nominee. Democrats made a terrible mistake, but once the election results were in, in a democracy there was no choice but to accept the results and look forward to the next election. Instead, as was revealed by in Shattered, Hillary Clinton devised a strategy of blaming others, including Russia, for her loss within twenty-four hours of losing.

The claim that Russia affected the election result was largely based upon the Steele Dossier. Clinton and the DNC had covered up their role in paying for this report for months, casting doubt on its reliability. More recently we learned that Christopher Steele is saying he believes the report is 70% to 90% accurate. In other words, he admits that thirty percent could be inaccurate.

Over the last several month, as information has come out on the Congressional and Mueller investigations, the evidence has cast further doubt on Clinton’s claims. We have seen substantial evidence of improper business dealings between Trump, members of his family, and key people in his campaign having improper business relations with Russia. We have seen evidence of Trump conspiring to cover this up. The indictments to date have related to financial dealings, and it appears that this is what Mueller is concentrating on.

On the other hand, evidence released through the Congressional hearings have shown that Russia’s advertising on Facebook and use of Twitter was too inconsequential to have had an impact. We learned during the recent Congressional testimony that material including ads from Russian Facebook pages accounted for “less than 0.004 percent of all content — or about 1 in 23,000 news feed items” on Facebook. Over half the ads were not even seen until after the election, and many had nothing to do with promoting Trump over Clinton. We also learned that the Russian Twitter accounts were not very large and that, of the tweets attributed to troll accounts Russia’s Internet Research Agency, only “9 percent of the tweets were election-related .” Even former Clinton adviser Mark Penn has argued that the Facebook ads were not the reason Clinton lost.

It has been commonplace to see sensational headlines of a smoking gun of Russian tampering with the election results, only to have them quickly shot down. One supposedly Russian site consisted of pictures of puppies. Just this week we had the revelation that Russia had designated money “to finance election campaign of 2016.” Rather being a smoking gun, this appears to have been money spent on the Russian Parliamentary elections. Yes, Russia has been caught meddling in their own election.

With report after report falling apart, we have no evidence of any more Russian meddling in the 2016 election than has been occurring for decades–with the United States similarly meddling in other elections. There is no evidence of a vast and successful conspiracy to change the results of the 2016 election. The biggest success attributed to Russia on Facebook has been to get 5000 to 10,000 people to turn out for a rally–a rally protesting against Donald Trump after the election.

In the interview Clinton claimed, “This is the first time we’ve ever been attacked by a foreign adversary and then they suffer no real consequences.” This is an especially chilling statement from a politician who has already participated in lying the country into wars, and is aligned with neoconservatives who wish to attempt regime change in Russia.

Just as chilling has been how this contrived scandal has been used to restrict political discourse. With the new McCarthyism which has overtaken many Democrats, to question this march towards conflict with Russia, no matter how reminiscent it is of the march towards war with Iraq over fake WMD, is countered with attacks of being pro-Russia. To oppose conflict with Russia over fake claims from the Clinton camp and other neocons no more means one is pro-Russia than opposing the rush to war with Iraq over false claims of WMD meant one was pro-Saddam.

Nobody likes to lose an election, but we have never encountered a situation such as this in which the loser questions the legitimacy of the election, endangers our national security in promoting unnecessary conflicts, and attacks First Amendment rights. Of course we have also never encountered much of what we have seen by the winner of the election either, but this provides no justification for Clinton’s actions.

It increasingly looks like a journalist can simply put out a headline with Russia and either Facebook or Twitter in it and create hysteria. Despite all the hype, we learned during the recent Congressional testimony that material from Russian pages accounted for “less than 0.004 percent of all content — or about 1 in 23,000 news feed items” on Facebook. Over half the ads were not even seen until after the election, and many had nothing to do with promoting Trump over Clinton.

It also looks like the biggest success attributed to Russia on Facebook has been to get 5000 to 10,000 people to turn out for a rally–a rally protesting against Donald Trump after the election.

Today’s hysterical headline is about Twitter, but looks far less scary when looking at the details. Apparently there were trolls on Twitter supporting Donald Trump. There is an enormous number of tweets going out every minute on Twitter, and a tweet does nothing if someone is not following the person tweeting. According to this article, the largest of these Russian troll pages had 25,045 followers at its peak, and the others had far fewer. These are far from widely viewed tweets. It also seems a safe bet that if these accounts were tweeting pro-Trump material, they were primarily followed by pro-Trump individuals and it is questionable whether they could actually change votes, especially considering the far larger number of people tweeting in favor of both Trump and Clinton.

The likelihood of them impacting the election appears even less after noting that of the tweets attributed to troll accounts from Russia’s Internet Research Agency, only “9 percent of the tweets were election-related .”

Most likely we are seeing a combination of things going on. There were probably Tweets and Facebook ads designed to disrupt American politics in general without supporting a particular candidate. There were many which had nothing to do with the election, very likely posts from Russian troll farms designed to obtain page hits, sometimes by making controversial comments. There very well could have also been some intentionally posted to try to help Donald Trump–but considering how small a percentage of overall Facebook and Twitter traffic they represented, it is absurd to say they were more important than Hillary Clinton’s war chest of over one billion dollars, and many others helping her (including paid trolls for Clinton). Even former Clinton adviser Mark Penn has written that this is not what cost Clinton the election.

Russia very likely has been misbehaving–as they have for decades, and as the United States government has. According to a paper of election meddling reviewed by Slate:

Using declassified documents, statements by officials, and journalistic accounts, Levin has found evidence of interference by either the United States or the Soviet Union/Russia in 117 elections around the world between 1946 and 2000, or 11.3 percent of the 937 competitive national-level elections held during this period. Eighty-one of those interventions were by the U.S. while 36 were by the USSR/Russia. They happened in every region of the world, though most commonly in Europe and Latin America. The two powers tended to focus on different countries, though Italy was a favorite of both, receiving eight interventions by the U.S. and four by the Soviets.

We should certainly work towards making Facebook and Twitter more transparent so people know when they are reading ads purchased by Russians. We should not be so naive as to think that we can control what appears on line in the internet age. We should also not take this to mean that there was some sort of unique conspiracy to push Clinton over Trump on social media in 2016. As was revealed in Shattered, Clinton came up with the excuse that Russia cost her the election within twenty-four hours of losing to distract from her own mistakes which cost her the election.

While there are legitimate responses to this issue, this should not be used as an excuse to restrict freedom of speech. The dangers from restricting free communication on Facebook and Twitter are far greater than the actual risk of Russia using social media to alter election results. The consequence of this hysteria has been to censor Americans on social media as I and others have been pointing out. This is what we must concentrate on avoiding. We also must be cautious about playing into neocon propaganda, with many of those now making the same noise attacking Russia are the same people who got this country into a war based upon false claims about Iraq and WMD.

Donald Trump has done so many despicable things that I’m no longer sure where to rank his latest feud with the mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico. His mishandling of this situation is reminiscent of George Bush’s mishandling of Katrina. The New York Times described his latest atrocious statements criticizing someone during a time of crisis:

As emergency workers and troops struggled to restore basic services in a commonwealth with no electricity and limited fuel and water, Mr. Trump spent the day at his New Jersey golf club, blasting out Twitter messages defending his response to the storm and repeatedly assailing the capital’s mayor, Carmen Yulín Cruz, and the news media.

“The Mayor of San Juan, who was very complimentary only a few days ago, has now been told by the Democrats that you must be nasty to Trump,” the president wrote on Twitter. “Such poor leadership ability by the Mayor of San Juan, and others in Puerto Rico, who are not able to get their workers to help.”

Mr. Trump said the people of Puerto Rico should not depend entirely on the federal government. “They want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort,” he wrote. “10,000 Federal workers now on Island doing a fantastic job. The military and first responders, despite no electric, roads, phones etc., have done an amazing job. Puerto Rico was totally destroyed.”

The president’s stream of Twitter bolts appeared repeatedly over the course of 12 hours and touched off a furious day of recriminations that fueled questions about his leadership during the crisis. Although Mr. Trump earned generally high marks for his handling of hurricanes that struck Texas and Florida recently, he has been sharply criticized for being slow to sense the magnitude of the damage in Puerto Rico, an American territory, and project urgency about helping.

He has explained that the challenges are different because Puerto Rico is “an island surrounded by water — big water, ocean water,” as he put it on Friday, but in recent days he has stepped up his public statements and dispatched a three-star general to take over the response. Mr. Trump’s aggressive Twitter messages on Saturday were in keeping with how he has acted during other moments of crisis, notably when he assailed the mayor of London, who is Muslim, after a terrorist attack, asserting that he did not take the threat seriously enough.

The Washington Post has described her record far more favorably, and objectively, than Trump has. Attacking her during this crisis must fall among the worst statements from Trump. James Fallows calls it a new low:

…his Twitter outburst this morning — as he has left Washington on another trip to one of his golf courses, as millions of U.S. citizens are without water or electricity after the historic devastation of Hurricane Maria, as by chance it is also Yom Kippur — deserves note. It is a significant step downward for him, and perhaps the first thing he has done in office that, in its coarseness, has actually surprised me. (I explained the difference, for me, between shock and surprisewhen it comes to Trump, in this item last week.) Temperamentally, intellectually, and in terms of civic and moral imagination, he is not fit for the duties he is now supposed to bear…

This has not happened before. It is not normal. It should not be acceptable. The United States is a big, resilient country, but a man like this can do severe damage to it and the world — and at the moment, he is leaving many Americans in mortal peril.

During the campaign, I argued that the greatest responsibility for Trump’s rise lay not with the man himself—he is who he is, he can’t help it—but with those Republicans who know what he is, and continue to look the other way. Their responsibility for the carnage of this era increases by the day, and has grown by quite a lot this weekend.

As it happens, I wrote and published that preceding paragraph a week ago. The Republicans’ responsibility is all the graver now, and deepens by the day.

Of course similar criticism can be made about Democratic partisans who ignore how Hillary Clinton has spent her career undermining liberal values, repeatedly promoting unnecessary, lying almost as much as Donald Trump (nobody is likely to surpass Trump here), and (like Trump) using her public positions for personal financial gain. Democratic partisans who excuse Clinton’s disregard for government transparency, lying to the American people, and probable obstruction of justice with slogans like “but her email” are hardly any different than Republican partisans who support Trump. Ignoring evil out of partisanship is wrong regardless of party.

I don’t see much hope for improvement in our government until more people from both parties judge politicians by both higher standards and by the same standards, regardless of whether they are from their party or the opposing party.

We all know that most people base their votes upon what they see on Twitter along with Facebook ads. As Twitter goes, so goes America.

Of course I am being sarcastic in response to the latest anti-Russia scare to hit the media and be investigated by Congress. Reportedly Twitter was packed with fake news the week before the election, allegedly even including fake news from Russia to attempt to sway the course of the election.

So far we have seen many sensationalist reports of Russian attempts to influence the election, with many quickly falling apart. At this point we really do not know if the release of email from the DNC was from a Russian hack or an inside leak–although nobody questions the accuracy of the information from Wikilieaks which shows how the DNC violated their own rules to rig the nomination for Hillary Clinton. Russians might have attempted to hack voting machines, but even if these reports are accurate, they all indicate that none of the attempts were successful.

Is Clinton really trying to claim that Russian trolls on Twitter were more effective in campaigning for her in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania than her own campaign was?

The real fake news is Hillary Clinton’s attempts to shift the blame for her loss to others. Shattered revealed that Clinton decided within twenty-four hours of losing to blame others such as Russia, as opposed to taking responsibility for her own mistakes. Did Russia send Hillary Clinton a tweet telling her to set up the private server–and then spend the next couple of years lying about it? Did Russia send Hillary Clinton a tweet telling her not to campaign in Wisconsin or Michigan?

Update: Best response to the post on Facebook–“Lord knows it’s hard enough to know what to think when my husband doesn’t tell me. So glad I have Twitter and Facebook to help me when he’s not around and I don’t know what to do!!”

I probably agree with most of the criticism of The Orville. Although flawed, as a long time Star Trek fan (as Seth MacFarlane is), I intend to give the show longer. The pilot did rely too much on jokes about the Captain and first officer’s divorce, but there were some other amusing moments. The episode introduced the major officers by having most of them being new to the Captain. Here’s one exchange as he met the second officer:

All right, uh, Lieutenant Commander Bortus, our second officer. You know, I’ve never met a single-gender species before. Your entire species is male, isn’t it?
That is correct, sir.
So, there’s probably not a lot of arguments about leaving the toilet seat up and that kind of thing, right?
No. Moclans urinate only once per year.
Really? That’s Me, I’m-I’m up two, three times a night.
That is unfortunate.
It is.

My favorite exchange was this parody of the technobabble often seen on Star Trek as the crew encounters something new. They saw a device which aged a banana a month, causing its destruction:

Janice has been experimenting with temporal fields and has made well, a breakthrough would be an understatement.
So, it’s an anti-banana ray?
It’s really interesting. We need no longer fear the banana.
Does it work on all fruit?
What about salads?

Obviously there are other uses for such a device.

Some previous Star Trek actors are interested and have agreed to cameos, including Wil Wheaton.

TrekMovie.com has interviewed Seth MacFarlane regarding his plans for the show. Information on tonight’s episode here.

Obviously there will also be some cross over between Star Trek: Discovery and previous series. Jonathan Frakes has directed an episode, and revealed that Discovery will be doing a Mirror Universe episode.

Trekmovie.com looks at the latest trailer for the show, giving some of the biggest clues as to what the series will be like one week before its September 24th premiere.

Netflix has listed the ten most rewatched episodes of Star Trek. They are not the ones I would choose, with a heavy concentration on Voyager.

Critics will not be able to review Discovery until after it airs, with no screeners being released. Some shows might suffer from reduced hype by taking such an action, but I don’t imagine this will happen as this is Star Trek. Plus it probably doesn’t matter to CBS whether people watch when first aired as with other shows. Their goal is to get people to subscribe to their streaming service, which will allow them to catch up after the original episode airs.

Netflix has listed the ten most rewatched episodes of Star Trek. While I agree with some choices, such as The Best of Both Worlds, they are not the tenI would choose, with a heavy concentration on Voyager.

EW can exclusively reveal that Candis Cayne will return as the Fairy Queen in season 3 (see the exclusive photo below), which finds magic-free Fillory under full but secret occupation by the fairies. In the new state of affairs, Eliot (Hale Appleman) and Margo (Summer Bishil) are the unwilling pawns of the Fairy Queen, who has her own dark vision for Fillory’s future and whose demands on Margo tend to be particularly baffling and hilariously humiliating — which is what you’d expect from this typically whimsical, mysterious, and at times sadistic species.

I have grown to like Margo, but seeing her tormented by the Fairy Queen could be amusing.

Legends of Tomorrow went from a weak series its first season to being the best of the CW DC shows last year. This was partially due to other series weakening with time, but Legends also did become much more fun the second season. Third season premiers on October 10. Promo above.

The BBC has released the synopsis for the Christmas episode of Doctor Who, Twice Upon A Time:

Two Doctors stranded in a forbidding snowscape, refusing to face regeneration. And a British army captain seemingly destined to die in the First World War, but taken from the trenches to play his part in the Doctor’s story.

This is the magical last chapter in the Twelfth Doctor’s epic adventure. He must face his past to decide his future. And the Doctor will realise the resilience of humanity, discovering hope in his darkest frozen moment.

It’s the end of an era. But the Doctor’s journey is only just beginning.

Mark Gatiss will be playing the British army captain and David Bradley will play the first Doctor. This episode will also introduce Jodie Whittaker as the thirteenth Doctor.

As I led with Star Trek and related news this week, it is worth noting that it was recently revealed that Peter Capaldi had once auditioned to play Benjamin Sisko on Deep Space Nine. It is hard to see him in the role in place of Avery Brooks. If the audition tape ever is released, it will be interesting to watch.

Pearl Mackie has been cast in her first role for after she leaves Doctor Who following the Christmas episode. She will play Lulu in Harold Pinter’s 1957 play The Birthday Party. The link includes an interview with Mackie.

Karen Gillan has revealed the disguises she used, along with Matt Smith and Arthur Davill, to blend in at a convention.

Claire Foy, who stars with Matt Smith in The Crown, has been cast as Lizbeth Salander for The Girl in the Spider’s Web. It will be interesting to see her in such a completely different type of role.

More excerpts have been released from What Happened. After Bernie Sanders spent months campaigning for Clinton, she repaid him by smearing and lying about him in her new book. While Hillary Clinton does get dirtier than most, such attacks on political opponents are expected during a political campaign. Hillary Clinton takes the political slime to new heights by continuing her dishonest attacks long after the primary is over, undermining her claims that Bernie only entered the race to disrupt the Democratic Party. If anyone is disrupting and damaging the party, it is Clinton.

In her forthcoming book, Clinton noted that the Vermont independent “isn’t a Democrat.”

“That’s not a smear, that’s what he says,” she wrote. “He didn’t get into the race to make sure a Democrat won the White House, he got in to disrupt the Democratic Party.”

After outlining how she disagrees with Sanders’ view of the Democratic Party, Clinton concludes, “I am proud to be a Democrat and I wish Bernie were, too.”

Clinton also complained that Sanders “attacks against her during the primary caused ‘lasting damage’and paved the way for ‘(Donald) Trump’s ‘Crooked Hillary’ campaign.'” Actually it was Hillary Clinton who paved the way for the Crooked Hillary campaign when Clinton used her political position to sell access and influence. This includes grossly violating the ethics agreement she entered into before she was confirmed as Secretary of State. What is really sad is that she does not even understand why her actions are rightfully considered crooked.

Clinton contradicted her own argument elsewhere in the book when she criticized Sanders’ ideas. She cannot consistently both deny there were disagreements on policy on one page and attack his ideas on another.

Despite her claims of agreeing on so much, during the campaign Clinton falsely claimed to be to the left of Sanders on guns during the campaign, despite his D- lifetime rating from the NRA, when it was Clinton who had described herself as a “pro-gun churchgoer” in 2008.

Clinton’s problem is that she did not stand for anything and could never answer questions as to why she was running. If she really stood for something, she might have written a book promoting what she believes in as opposed to resorting to a book of bogus excuses for why she lost.

Clinton even resorted to repeating the debunked Bernie Bros narrative, which was actually created by Clinton supporters in an attempt to discredit her opponents. While sexist attacks on her supporters as she described undoubtedly did occur, comparable attacks on Sanders supporters from Clinton supporters were probably far more common on social media, with their attacks being both racist and sexist with their repeated slurs against “white males,” often including quite a bit of profanity. I have blocked far more supporters of Hillary Clinton on Facebook than backers of any other candidate for their rude, dishonest, and harassing behavior. This included Clinton supporter Tom Watson, who released portions of the book on Twitter.

Clinton’s arguments were essentially the same type made by her most rabid supporters such as Peter Daou, who launched a new pro-Clinton propaganda site over the weekend, which I wrote about yesterday.

There is some justice in the world. Despite the attempts of Clinton and her supporters to promote her with such falsehoods, Clinton’s favorability has fallen further since the election. As The Hill points out:

According to the latest Harvard-Harris Poll survey, Sanders is the most popular active politician in the nation, at 54 percent favorable and 36 percent unfavorable. Clinton’s favorability has not improved in her time out of the spotlight. She remains underwater at 42 percent positive and 53 percent negative.

There is an excellent chance that Clinton’s book will backfire and her favorability will fall further. RogueDNC correctly showed what section of the book store What Happened belongs in their graphic above.

Don’t believe for a moment that just because Hillary Clinton suffered a humiliating defeat to Donald Trump that the Clintonistas are gone for good. Peter Daou, the Steve Bannon for Team Clinton, has set up yet another pro-Clinton propaganda site named Verrit. After Clinton mentioned the site on Twitter the site crashed. While the most likely explanation is that it could not handle the heavy influx of Clinton supporters who saw her Tweet, Daou insists on social media that it has been verified that this was a denial of service attack.

As is usual with the Orwellian claims from Peter Daou, the propaganda put out by Clinton supporters are facts while actual verified facts about Hillary Clinton are labeled “smears and harassment and false narratives and negative talking points.” Also typical of Daou, anyone who disagrees with the narrow viewpoints acceptable in Hillaryland is either from the radical right or the fringe left. There is no room in his mind for any rational disagreement from either conservatives or anyone more liberal than Hillary Clinton.

The saga began Sunday night when Clinton — to the apparent surprise of her followers — took to Twitter to offer her personal endorsement of a new, relatively unknown website called Verrit.

In the words of its creator, Peter Daou, Verrit is his attempt to create an online hub for Clinton backers so that they can find easy-to-share facts, stats and other “information you can take out to social media when you’re having debates on key issues people are discussing,” he said in an interview…

Soon after Clinton’s tweet, though, Verrit stopped loading for web users — the result of a “pretty significant and sophisticated” cyber attack, Daou told Recode. He declined to share the name of his hosting company, and did not yet know who exactly was behind the incident. But he said the traffic driven by Clinton’s endorsement — which generated more than 10,000 new Twitter followers for Verrit — isn’t responsible for the outage.

Once it’s back online, Daou nonetheless has big ideas for Verrit. A former aide to Clinton’s 2008 campaign who later ran ShareBlue, a left-leaning news site that defended her candidacy, he wants Verrit to become a “platform or place in the media” for Clinton backers to “call home and feel like they’re not facing attacks and smears and harassment and false narratives and negative talking points.”

The site was unavailable earlier on Sunday. I was able to access it earlier today, but it is no longer accessible as I am completing this post. Assuming Daou is correct about this being a denial of service attack, this is not terribly surprising. While I am opposed to the use of this tactic by any side and against any target, Daou has certainly provoked such attacks with his frequent vile and dishonest attacks against those who do not share his narrow political views and worship of Hillary Clinton. Bernie Sanders and his supporters, along with Republicans, are frequent targets of such attacks.

On Friday, Susan G. Komen, the world’s largest nonprofit in the fight against breast cancer, the International Red Cross, The Salvation Army, Autism Association of Palm Beach County, and Big Dog Ranch Rescue in Loxahatchee Groves announced they would not hold their events at Trump’s Palm Beach club during the winter fundraising season.

Those announcements came a day after the Cleveland Clinic, American Cancer Society and the American Friends of Magen David Adom, an organization supporting Israel disaster relief programs, said they would seek alternative venues. The Cleveland Clinic plans to hold its Feb. 23 ball at The Breakers in Palm Beach.

The International Red Cross announcement, in particular, marks the end of an era. Mar-a-Lago’s original owner, Marjorie Merriweather Post, hosted the IRC’s first ball there and Trump has been a frequent chairman of the event. And Big Dog Rescue, which counts Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump as a gala co-chair, decided Friday to move its fundraiser only a day after it reiterated its intention to stick with Mar-a-Lago.

“Ignoring your hateful rhetoric would have made us complicit in your words and actions …” the letter stated. “Supremacy, discrimination, and vitriol are not American values. Your values are not American values. We must be better than this. We are better than this. If this is not clear to you, then we call on you to resign your office, too.”

We have not seen a president this isolated since Richard Nixon in the final days before his resignation. This makes me wonder if we are getting close to seeing Donald Trump talking to the pictures of former presidents on the White House walls as Richard Nixon did. Or perhaps his often irrational middle of the night Tweets are the modern day equivalent.